But what about testing it? I met so many developers that were surprised after hearing about unit testing of equals method. So should we unit test it? YES, of course! If it’s generated by IDE, it often has a lot of null check if statements. Testing such code means covering a lot of test scenarios. Also static code analyzer will probably complain about cyclomatic complexity violations.

If you are using object with custom equals method in HashMap or HashSet, we need to conform to hashCode vs equals contract. Eventual issues in this contract can lead into very tricky behavior of our map or set. Therefore I rather use some unique String or numeric representation as key in the map so that I don’t need to create equals. HashSet is type I try to avoid completely.

So if most common reasons for creating equals method for production code are avoided, what about testing? Verifications in tests often require to compare if objects have fields with same values. Of course it doesn’t make sense to create equals only for testing assertions. Sometimes we also have nested types to compare. And what about comparison of arrays or lists during testing?

Luckily there is very neat library called Unitils. It provides various testing helpers for Hibernate, Database and I/O testing or mocking. But I was using only module called Reflection assert. It makes comparison of Java objects during testing piece of cake.

First test method created two separate instances of Person and compares them. Second test method intentionally creates difference in nested Address field between actual and expected, so that we can explore Unitils output:

First test method is comparing arrays. It will succeed, because we instructed Unitils to ignore order of elements with parameter ReflectionComparatorMode.LENIENT_ORDER. In second test method, we don’t use reflection comparator mode parameter, so order matters. Because it’s is different for actual and expected arrays, test will fail with this output:

Since I started diving into automated testing and practicing TDD, verification of date values was pain. Luckily there is nice library for legacy Date and new Java 8 DateTime APIs, which cures this pain.

If you belong to healthier part of Java development community and practicing unit testing on daily basis, you probably are aware of Hamcrest Java library. It can make your tests much more readable. It’s architecture is very modular and is used by various other testing libraries.

Major part of it’s flexibility is it concept of Matcher. I am not going to dive into this concept now. If you are not familiar, just take a quick look at Hamcrest tutorial. One of the matcher you can plug into your testing toolbox is library hamcrest-date. With this library we can easily test that date was generated within certain range:

Historically I disliked creating design UML diagrams, because the tooling for it mostly requires drawing boxes and connecting them with lines or arrows. I find such workflow very time consuming and wasteful. This short blog post will describe much better way to create UML diagrams.

But first of all, you may argue that UML importance in today’s agile software development world is fading out. I would agree partially.

Creating UML Class Diagrams

From my point of view UML class diagrams are needed very rarely. I can find only two use cases for it:

To analyze existing code base

To communicate suggested design with the team

When you need to analyze existing code base, class diagrams can be easily generated by your IDE from the existing code. IntelliJ idea provides this as part of payed version:

When we need to sketch class diagram upfront to consult design with the team, I would suggest to create prototype with desired class structure instead and generate class diagram from the live code (again with IDE). You may find some important facts about the design while creating prototype. There’s no need to create logic and tests, just APIs of the design.

And of course when you don’t need such generated diagram anymore, just wipe it out. Low level design may change easily and you don’t want to keep outdated diagrams around. You can generate new diagram from live code easily.

Non-Class diagrams

So when we need Class diagram, it’s smart to generate it from live code. But what about other UML diagrams like:

Structure diagrams (except Class diagram)

Behavioral diagrams

Interaction diagrams (especially useful is Sequence diagram from this bucket)

I personally created only few Use case and Flow chart diagrams during my career. But Sequence and Component diagrams are very useful to document high-level design decisions. Of course you don’t want to have them very detailed, but at high level designer intentions and considerations are sometimes good to document.

But the tool that is used for designing these diagrams has to be very easy to use and flexible. Sorry Visio or Enterprise Architect, I don’t include you into this bucket (although I have to admin I haven’t use EA for long time).

My tool of choice it PlantUML. We can define design with very simple DSL. Therefore instead of connecting boxes and lines on canvas, we can focus on design itself. It can be used as standalone application but it also have impressive list of integrations. So you can easily use it with your IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse or Spring Tool Suite.

Very compelling fact for me, is that DSL which defines diagrams can live with the project code-base and also be handled by source control system, with all the goodness it brings. This is simple screenshot from IntelliJ:

I was recently speeding up Gradle build on TravisCI for one Dotsub project. It builds Spring Boot based project (written in Java), but also uses Gulp sub-tasks on top of NodeJS to bundle front-end code and assets. This blog post is about sharing these small build optimization hints. They are also shared in this Github repository.

Default TravisCI configuration for Gradle

So as part of your build, Gradle is executed twice by default. And it also does make some sense when you take a look at how Gradle Java plugin works:

As you can see assemble and check phases has only few initial phases in common. There isn’t much tasks redundancy if we run assemble and check separately.

There is also Gradle UP-TO-DATE feature. It means Gradle is smart enough to mark task as UP-TO-DATE after first execution. Redundant execution of this task can be than skipped if its input doesn’t change. Of course it works across various separate build executions. Let’s take a look at what happen when we build mentioned example project with this example configuration. Link to build is here.

As you can see execution of check task didn’t have to run tasks compileJava, processResources and classes again, because they were executed previously as part of assemble task.

So TravisCI default configuration may seem reasonable for Gradle.

Merge install and script phase

But even if Gradle makes best effort to reduce overhead, the overhead is there. As Gradle Java Plugin tasks visualization showed earlier in the blog post, we can cover assemble and check tasks with build task. So why should we run two Gradle processes in single build when single process execution is enough?

Also mentioned two default tasks may be fine for Continuous Integration workflow, but modern developers and teams doesn’t stop there. Every company that takes software development seriously wants to incorporate Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment. So we want to assemble, check, build and deploy all our assets in one build pipeline. So why would we want to run two Gradle processes?

So even if Gradle tries to optimize tasks as much as possible, there is noticeable overhead running two separate Gradle processed instead of two.

Cache Gradle and NodeJS dependencies

Second hint to speed up TravisCI build for Gradle can be found in TravisCI docs itself. It involves Gradle dependencies caching.

As I mentioned at the beginning, project I work on also involves Gulp/NodeJS build. Therefore it make sense to put also NPM dependencies into TravisCI cache. Gradle integration with Gulp can be done via Gradle Gulp plugin. This plugin locates NPM global dependencies into $HOME/.gradle/nodejs and local NPM depndencies into node_modules folder.

So full of Gradle caching configuration for our build looks like this:

Stack of application I am currently working on at Dotsub is based on Java/Spring Boot back-end and React/Redux front-end. To have confidence that this application works end to end, we are using Selenium tests. It is very easy to run them as part application build, because Spring Boot testing support allows to run full application as part of application build. We use Gradle as main build system and it is all running on Travis continuous integration server. To demonstrate this approach for end to end testing I created small Hello World project on GitHub.

Build

Build system of choice is Gradle. Creation of following Gradle script was very easy, because I used Spring Initializr:

It is very standard Spring Boot construct for Spring context initialization. Annotation @SpringBootApplication turns on Spring Boot auto-configuration. It sets up most sensible defaults for out application, which is most importantly embedded servlet container in this case.

Second part of our simple application code is front-end code. For demonstration purposes this simplest React example (taken from React getting started guide) will be enough:

It uses Babel to transpile JSX inline and pulls React libraries from CDN. It doesn’t do any AJAX calls to server. We also didn’t create any Spring controller for serving requests. It is because goal of this example is to demonstrate Selenium testing against React+Spring Boot app, therefore I skipped communication between client and server.

This simple HTML + React Hello World page is located in file src/main/resources/static/index.html, where it will be picked up by Spring Boot and exposed as default web page content when request hits root URL of embedded servlet container.

Simple Selenium Test

Following listing shows how can we approach selenium testing against Spring Boot application:

Before test, it starts Firefox Selenium driver. During test it visits default specified address https://localhost:8080. This should hit our index.html. Next phase of the test is waiting for Hello, world! header to be rendered on screen. After this happens, test is done and Selenium driver is closed. When we run this test locally, we can see following pop-up appear on the screen.

Travis Configuration

Last piece of this example it TravisCI configuration manifest. Relevant parts of it are here:

First of all we specify that Java 8 is our language of choice. Before script part is taken from TravisCI docs. It starts Xvfb (X virtual frame buffer), which simulates X11 display server on Linux machine without screen. This allows render our site virtually, because TravisCI build machine contains installation of Firefox by default. This configuration is enough for Selenium tests. In script phase we start full Gradle build.

Possible Travis problems and solution

All this configuration may be enough for you to start simple Selenium testing again React application. But default Firefox version on TravisCI machine is 31.0 ESR. This is quite old version and some of our React pages may not be rendered correctly during the build. Luckily TravisCI allows to update Firefox version with this simple manifest declaration:

addons:
firefox: "44.0"

This installs new version of Firefox on TravisCI, but unfortunately it is not enough because of this open TravisCI issue. Consequence is that default configuration of Selenium Firefox driver configuration use old Firefox binary instead of new one.

But when I executed which firefox command on Travis, it was pointing to new binary file. Therefore I used this Selenium Driver initialization to pick up newer Firefox binary on Travis:

Testing logic is the same as for example test we already introduced. Different is initialization of Firefox Selenium driver. In this case we first recognize if we are running in Travis environment via environment variable TRAVIS. If we are not running in Travis, we use default Firefox driver initialization.

If we are running in TravisCI build, we use standard Java class ProcessBuilder to execute Linux command which firefox in separate process and grab it’s output. This gives us path of newer Firefox binary. Based on this path, we initialize Firefox Selenium driver and are good to automatically run Selenium test against latest Firefox on TravisCI build machine.